


We Try To Fly (But Fall More Often Than Not)

by Oblivian03



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angel Wings, Angst, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Self-Mutilation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 03:00:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29075214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oblivian03/pseuds/Oblivian03
Summary: Amenadiel tries to help his brother accept his wings. The task is more difficult than it should be and success seems as far away as home.
Relationships: Amenadiel & Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV)
Kudos: 27





	We Try To Fly (But Fall More Often Than Not)

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Lucifer (obviously). 
> 
> Just a little drabble thing that attempts to deal more with Lucifer cutting off his wings and Amenadiel’s reaction to it. I don’t think this fits entirely within the canon or timeline of season 3, but let’s imagine it does somewhere.

The grass was shifting gently below them, yellow daisy heads bobbing in turn where they spotted the natural meadow. Two brown ears stuck up where the grass dipped in length, a tiny nose just visible should one look hard enough. The breeze was soft. The sun was warm. Little birds twittered in their sweeping flights overhead. It was a place of peace and unmarred wild, far from any human eyes or troubles.

Amenadiel inhaled, tilting his face towards the open sky. His eyes were closed, soaking in the warmth (and barring, in part, the familiar ache for a home he could not yet return to).

“This whole endeavour is pointless.”

The breeze shifted and Amenadiel exhaled with it. Opening his eyes, he looked to where his brother stood. “You agreed to this, Luci,” he said.

“Well, I don’t know why,” Lucifer returned, “If I had of known it would be this boring just standing here while you ogle at the same world that has existed for millennia, I would have refrained from giving my word.”

The caustic sting beneath the Devil’s words washed over Amenadiel like much of what his brother said, an occurrence Amenadiel was slowly learning to let flow past him untouched. There was less arguing this way. Less hurt to carry with him that led to anger and poor decisions.

“If you are ready, you only have to say the word,” God’s fallen eldest said.

Lucifer breathed sharply through his nose, nostrils flaring as his form tightened around itself and his head turned to scan their surrounds.

“If you’re worried someone will see-”

“Maze is guarding the perimeter. No one will make it within sight of us, even if they could find us out in the middle of bloody nowhere,” Lucifer said, adjusting the cuffs of his sleeves. “In fact, I pity the poor sod who has the misfortune to stumble across our little venture here.”

Amenadiel quirked his eyebrows in acknowledgement. His brother’s right hand was terrifying. Her very force and will and insatiable taste for blood gave life to the first macabre tales of demons ever told by human firesides. Even Amenadiel felt uneasy when Maze was in a vicious mood, God’s first warrior though he was (and still was, still had to be despite his fall).

A long caw drew itself out to hang amid the trees. There was a pause as Lucifer held his tongue, his sharp words fizzling in the face of his brother’s silence. Amenadiel turned his gaze back towards the sky, rolling his shoulders reflexively as a murder of crows broke free from a clump of trees nearby and cut across the vast blue above. A feather fell, too dark to be grey.

“Are you ready, brother?” Amenadiel bit out.

“Touchy, touchy. Isn’t patience supposed to be a heavenly virtue?”

“Lucifer-”

“Fine.” The Devil rolled his shoulders and his great, white wings appeared behind him on the earthly plane.

They were as magnificent as always, full of such life and vigor in stark contrast to the limp appendages Amenadiel had burned not three days ago. Divinity shone in them, pure and unadulterated. The sunlight that bounced off them made the white glow all the more. The sight brought a swell of emotions that formed a lump in Amenadiel’s chest.

“I still fail to see what exactly this is supposed to achieve.”

The words gave Amenadiel the excuse he was looking for to pinch the bridge of his nose, thumb discretely squashing a welling tear. He inhaled again, the reverse of a long-suffering sigh any older brother soon learnt to give.

“Ideally, the end of your foul rejection of your wings,” he told his brother for the seventh time. “Linda thought putting them to use as something _other_ than kindling might…aid you in seeing a new perspective on the matter.”

“The Doctor can hardly understand the matter to begin with, celestial as it is and given the fact she lacks the same appendages Dad seems so set on sticking me with!”

Amenadiel cocked an eyebrow. “Yet here you are all the same.”

Lucifer looked away, his wings unconsciously huddling behind him. “This utterly ludicrous.”

“Just give it a try, Luci. What do you have to lose?”

His derisive snort was followed by a shaky breath Amenadiel pretended not to hear. The elder brother stepped up to the edge of the large rock they stood on, peering to where the ground sat barely a man’s length below. Lucifer followed, doing the same.

“This is giving into Dad’s manipulations.”

“Or it will remind you of the freedom that comes with flight,” Amenadiel replied.

Truly, there was nothing quite like it, the feel of wind between one’s feathers as they soared through the heavens God had made. It took great strength to hold oneself there, but it was liberating in a way little else was. The sky held only clouds and, on a good day (back in those early days) other siblings twisting and dancing on the breeze. There were no objects to stumble over, no souls to feel crowded by, and if one looked towards the horizon it was a though one could fly forever onwards with ne’er a glance behind.

Freedom, Amenadiel thought, hung in the air suspended as weight between two wings instead of being tethered to an unmovable ground.

(When had Amenadiel ever longed for freedom in the Silver City that was his home? When had he started?)

Lucifer inhaled beside him, closing his eyes and muttering a curse before finally launching himself forward. For a moment it seemed as though his wings would refuse to open, but they did, catching the breeze with two great flaps and lifting their owner through the air. Amenadiel smiled.

“You can open your eyes, Luci, you will not fall for your wings seem to know their job well enough,” he said.

“That is easy for you to say from where you’re standing,” Lucifer returned, but he peeled open one eye and then the other anyway. For a moment he hovered, face to face with his brother. Both gave small huffs of laughter, more thoughtless relief of tension behind it than anything else.

Amenadiel watched as the Devil experimented with his movement, twisting here and there, ducking low and floating higher as his wings stretched themselves. The elder knew that Lucifer had used his wings before to return from that desert he had woken to find them in, and that he had possessed his wings for far longer than he had deprived himself of them. The instinct of flight was imbued in his being and this showed through as he rose higher and higher.

Yet, a new-born glee and surprise marked each shift of those wings. Noticing this hurt Amenadiel more than the prick of jealousy that stung him. Flight was a joyful thing and it seemed Lucifer had denied himself the feeling of it for far too long. It was wrong and, he feared, it could not be helped.

(This was his test he had told Linda. A test of what, he was less certain of.)

“You are doing well, brother,” the fallen angel called, conjuring a smile, “Just like when we were young.”

Lucifer huffed a breath, the corner of his mouth tweaking up sardonically. Suddenly he drew his wings in, letting himself fall through the air. Amenadiel gave a shout. He rolled his shoulders, arms reaching out, but his feet remained rooted in the ground. Helplessly he looked on as his brother fell the short distance to the ground.

“Luci!” The former angel leapt from the rock, rolling to his feet as he ran to his brother’s crumpled form. “Lucifer!”

The crumpled from shifted, wings dragged carelessly along the ground in a way that made Amenadiel roll his shoulders in a wince. A number of feathers were now crooked and bent, several having been ripped from the wings due to the roughness of the landing. Lucifer kicked them away as he rose to one knee, then his feet, dark eyes gleaming with that ever-present bitterness and fury.

“There,” he said, “Just like when we were young, fall and all. Only this time they’re a little better for wear.”

“What were you thinking?” Amenadiel snapped. “What foolish stunt was that?”

“What do you think?” the Devil spat back, “A reminder. Flight is not freedom, it’s a surrender to the mercy of His whims. It took no thought of His to cut me from the air and cast me through it down to the fiery pits we both so despise.”

“That was millennia ago,” Amenadiel returned, “That was before-”

“My what, redemption?” Lucifer laughed. “Why redeem me now? No. He has some other insidious plan, and I will not be party to it, not this time. If he wants me to fly only to fall again, then I’ll not give him the pleasure of flying at all.”

“Have you ever thought that maybe this isn’t Father manipulating you? That maybe, just maybe there is another reason behind the miracle of your wings? We still don’t know why they returned. We don’t know why they keep returning even when you insist on hacking them off.”

“I know well enough. It’s a punishment,” Lucifer snarled. “A punishment for Mum, for refusing to return to Hell, for not bowing to his great, ineffable Plan.” 

“They are a part of you,” Amenadiel tried, his voice as earnest as the expression on his face. “Brother, they are _part_ of you.”

“No,” Lucifer said, “They are a part He wants me to be.”

Silence descended upon them, as unforgiving as it ever was. No balm did it offer for the troubled thoughts in either mind and, indeed, it seemed heavy enough to suffocate. Eventually Lucifer returned his dishevelled wings to their original plane and made for the direction of the corvette.

“Luci…”

“Leave me be.”

“Okay.” Amenadiel turned away, not bothering to look as his brother strode away.

God’s eldest knew he should find Maze, let her know they had finished before some poor sod did stumble across her, but his legs betrayed him to the gravity he longed to escape. Collapsing with a gasp, he tried vainly to restrain the darkness that engulfed his heart. Lucifer called their Father cruel and in this it seemed he was. Why give wings to one who refused them so violently, recoiled from them so destructively when another would give anything to have his own back?

Yet, this thought seemed a betrayal of God. Amenadiel had faith in his Father, shaken though it was, and had to put faith in his own argument that perhaps this cruelty was not His doing at all. If he feared this was the case, it was only another burden to bear. The wings’ presence hurt Lucifer and if his suspicions were true, if emotions and belief in one’s self played a role, then the solution to this would require his brother to reconcile with and accept parts of himself the Devil was adamant did not exist. It seemed a nigh impossible task. It all seemed impossible.

(Home was high above the earth, in a silver city of clouds and sky. Yet, however much he reached, however badly he wanted and much he tried, he always found himself on Earth, unmoved and unmoving.)

Giving in, Amenadiel relinquished himself to his despair and cried.

~ ~ ~

When Amenadiel next entered his brother’s apartment, he was greeted by a sharp grin and those typical angry (hurting) eyes. Lucifer held a glass of scotch in one hand, several other empty ones lined up atop the piano. He inhaled and imagined he could smell the faint coppery scent of angel blood.

“I refuse to let Dad get one over me anymore,” Lucifer said as he slammed the low keys of his piano in a dark melody. Maze’s demon knives glinted cruelly in the light. “I will not fall prey to His manipulations again.”

The words were enough to know what he had done. Again. If there were any mercy in the world, then perhaps the wings would not grow back this time round.

Pushing back a torrent of feelings, Amenadiel sighed and asked his brother for a bag. 


End file.
